On 8/14/07, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> ... Some of the tables I've seen discussed in these
> threads are so complex that I don't understand what they are supposed to
> represent, and I'm not blind -- we probably don't want to encourage
> authors to write that kind of table in the first place! ...
I agree -- I don't really understand them either. But I don't think
this is relevant. These tables are designed to communicate with
experts primarily (e.g. statisticians, accountants, etc.) and when
they're from a government source accessibility is often a legal
requirement.
I've needed to publish tables like this and really am looking for
support in HTML to accomplish this (and I've been pretty confident
HTML4.01 could handle it, waiting to see where HTML5 goes on the
topic). Here's an example:
http://www.disability.qld.gov.au/budget/06-07/mps/financial.html (If
you dig a little further you can see in 2007-08 the publishers opted
to use pdf/rtf rather than HTML. You can draw your own conclusions
from that.)
cheers
Ben